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


"Rumpelstiltskin" <PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:6oteo3dcgu62m43rqhe3ua2vetefbe81kq@xxxxxxxxxx
On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 06:38:50 -0600, "John Galt"
<whoisjohngalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Rumpelstiltskin" <PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message


<snip>


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


There's always a reason "we can't", just as there's always
a reason people "can't" pay off their credit card debts. What
we really "Can't" (capital C) do is keep running up the debt.

THAT I agree with. Just cut spending to the taxation levels, and quit
pretending that America will fall apart without all that government.

If the Democrats are proposing tax cuts, I hope that's for the
poor and middle class, compensated by raising taxes on the
upper brackets, preferably to pre-Reagan when the country
was doing better than it is now. That probably isn't what
anybody's proposing though, because they're wimps and
are addicted to lobbyist's legal bribes. Kucinich would do it.

They're considering rebates to low and middle income and people with kids.
That will fly. They're also considering a bunch of other social benefits
that might or might not stimulate the economy, but are sure to draw a veto.
We'll see where it goes.

I like at the above URL "As such, some Democrats are
suggesting limiting tax rebates to lower-income and
middle-class families and people with children." As always,
of course, there's nothing in it for me, but I hope that any
such cuts as are proposed will be balanced or
preferably overbalanced by higher rates on the wealthiest.

That's the rub on this package. It (again) breaks pay/go, and will increase
the debt. If they try and screw with the marginal rates, they'll draw a
veto.

Of course, I've always been in favour of treating
capital gains as regular income, though all my
income these days other than retirement and SS is
capital gains. It seems to me absurd that money people
work for should be taxed higher than money they don't
work for. As to "stimulating the economy", that would
IMV be better served by funneling more money to those
people who will spend it because they need stuff more.
I see, also at the above URL, a surprising tacit admission
of that at least one bigwig in the Republican party:
"Liberal economists say boosting food stamps is one of
the most efficient ways of pumping money into the
economy, an idea surprisingly embraced by GOP
economist Martin Feldstein at a Brookings Institution
forum on Thursday."

Hard to argue with that. The criticism of writing everyone a check is that
it might just get slapped on their credit card bills. Can't do that with
food stamps. You have to buy food with them. That stimulates the entire
supply chain that ends up putting grub on grocery shelves.

Even if the Democrats come up with something
worthwhile, which is doubtful in itself, it's sure to be
vetoed by the President or mostly self-sabotaged
because of a need to avoid a veto, I'd say.

I suspect GWB would take the rebates and the food stamps in return for an
extension of the tax cuts. Of course, that's crappy long term policy.

I see near the end that the article says "Leaders in
both parties also will have to deal with the deficit
hawks in each." They're talking about me, and the
idea they just have to "deal with" us seems to me to
mean that they're going to keep traveling down the
road to ruin, and put off yet again doing what must
be done.

When Huckabee was on CNBC the other day, you got a really clear picture on
how Wall Street sees the issue. The Mensa Blonde asking the question put it
this way: "Are you for balanced budgets, OR are you a supply sider?" The
politicians won't admit the two are different. Wall Street knows better.


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


I wish somebody, someday, would notice what a pass
that philosophy has brought us to. Kucinich has, and has
pointed it out repeatedly, but most unfortunately he's not
going to get elected this time.


< 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.


I don't know what you mean by that, but if it means
"keep expenses no higher than receipts", that's not
enough but I'll take what I can get for the moment
just to keep the debt from getting any higher. Ain't
going to happen though, I don't think.

Federal agencies have built in budget increases tied to inflation. If
inflation is 3%, the Dept of Education STARTS the next year by budgeting a
3% increase. In Washington-speak, that 3% increase would be called a "zero
budget increase for the fiscal year."

Only in Washington do they think like this.

So, since nobody will ever have the cojones to try and cut specific
nonfunctional programs in the goverment (and if they do, they'd likely lose
their cojones, and their job, in the attempt) seasoned deficit hawks like to
talk about flatlining the budget. So, if this year's discretionary budget is
1.25T, then you hold the line at 1.25T for as long as it takes to come into
balance, considering that tax receipts increase each year (unless we're in
recession.)

That would only take about three years. Now, obviously during that time
existing agencies have to do more with less, since they're being eaten away
a bit by inflation during this period. Employees that retire won't be
replaced, federal workers don't get raises, and agencies have to make some
choices as to what they can and cannot do. Some subprograms might have to be
cut, particularly in the final year of the effort.

But it would only take 3 years. Agonizingly close, eh? Makes you wonder why
we did'nt do it a long time ago.



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


It's way more than 2/3. That's a logarithmic scale.



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.


As I said, that's a logarithmic curve. A slight increase of
curvature in the high range is vastly more money than the
same rate of increase at a lower range. That particularly
includes the GWBush increase which has been nearly half
of the total, from about $6T to pushing $10T in those
seven years. Speaking of the graph the way you did is
misleading.

The purpose of a log scale is to remove compounding effects. GWB is not
responsible for the interest on the debt that any previous president
incurred. If you use a non-log scale, it looks like the majority of the debt
has been incurred in the last 8 years. That's misleading.

In 1982, the debt was only $1T, so nearly all the current
debt happened since then. It looks like only about $1T of
the debt from Reagan on was Clinton's, and you notice
the increase went nearly flat at the end of Clinton's term,
the only time it has done so since Reagan, only to suddenly
rise again with GWBush in office.


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.)


All but about $1.5T of the current $9T debt came from Reagan
and the Bushes. Don't forget, the curve at the URL you gave is
logarithmic.

How much of that is compounding on previous debt?

What matters, when "judging" these presidents on this issue, is the
compounded sum of the absolute deficits they incurred during their
presidency. The log scale comes closer to showing that, but you have to back
out the compounding. Taking your own figures cited (1T in 1982) compounded
at any average rate of 5% over 25 years is. 3.225T. So, if today's debt is
10T, we can accurately state that a third of that debt was incurred prior to
the Reagan tax package.


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,


If that's the way it is, the country is doomed, and that's the
way that is.

That's the way it is. Whether it is doomed or not waits to be seen. The
candidates recognize it -- some voters on the far left deny it.


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.


We don't have to explain anything to the pentagon unless
they take over as in Greece, Chile, and Argentina.


Accept that we cant afford to keep A THOUSAND military bases
overseas, which is about what we have.


We're on the same page there. Most of those bases
should have been closed before, and really should be
closed now that we're on the brink of economic collapse.

Tell the farmers theyll have to go it
along without ag subsidies.


Most of the subsidies go to mass farming, and we could
kill those. We could kill the rest, but that would hurt
ordinary people rather than plutocrats, and it's relatively
little money compared to the pentagon and the size of
the tax cuts, so I'd be less sanguine about that. That's
based on "for the people" rather than "for the plutocrats".>

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.

I don't even know what Head Start is, though I seem to
recall it has something to do with education. A lot of stuff
in education these days seems to me like piffle, though I
wouldn't want to be the one myself to decide what is and
what isn't.

HS is a pre-K program for low income students. HS kids go into the first
grade reading at 2nd grade level. At the end of the 3rd grade, they read at
the 3rd grade level. At the end of the 4th grade, they read at the 3rd grade
level. HS does not give low income kids any sort of "head start" that isn't
destroyed in short order by the crappy government schools they have to
attend in their neighborhoods. Not money well spent.

Marijuana and hashish should be decriminalized and be
legally available as they are in Holland, IMV. For the others,
the question for me is addictiveness and potential for
violence, though when politicians mixed with Christian
fundamentalists and "status quo" get into the act, all
chance of honesty flies out the window. Alcohol, one of
the most addictive and most violence-prone drugs, and
certainly the most accident-causing drug of all, is legal,
while marijuana which is less harmful than coffee is not.

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.

As you can see from the graph, Clinton's rise was much smaller
than that of Reagan or the Bushes, and at the end of Clinton's
reign, the line almost went flat, until GWBush got in. Don't
forget, this is a logarithmic curve.

That's the entire point -- the slope is the slope, and tells you what's
going on. Of course, had Clinton had his way on health care, he never would
have changed that slope.



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.


If Medicare doesn't pay these bills, the people will have to
do it out of their own pockets. They can't afford it, so more
people will die. That is one solution, granted. A better
solution, or partial solution, would be National Health, so we
can control costs the way other countries do. That would
cut down on the costs, Medicare or not.

Americans will not accept a rationed care program or one that restricts
choice, ultimately. Not a lot of savings in managed care if patients aren't
cooperative.



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.

Ah, now we get to tariffs, and also doing something
to make such exportation of profit without paying taxes
a criminal and lively-prosecuted offense, which is
something that hasn't been discussed lately in
soc.retirement. It is criminal morally, and if it isn't
criminal legally then we need to make it so. The
solution to thievery is not to make things easier for
the thieves.

You can do anything you want with bootjacks and laws that restrict people's
freedom to do what they want with their money. As I said before to GZB, feel
free, but what you have at the end of the tunnel isn't an America that's
worth living in anymore.

JG



"Some folks rob you with a gun, and some folks
rob you with a fountain pen." -- Bob Dylan



<snip>




.

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