largest deficit EVER- yes, EVER!!! And you still back BUSH...hahaha

[LRB]

Originally posted by: reeds
Dude- you better rethink what you said- that you dont have an issue with the deficit...Greenspan disagrees, and he is one very smart man...
Greenspan has warned in the past that a rising budget deficit can cause interest rates to go up and could jeopardize the nation's long-term economic health.

By the time all Baby Boomers retire in 2030, the United States will have twice as many elderly folk as it does now. Meanwhile, the number of workers paying for their benefits will increase by just 18 percent.
If things continue as they're going, the Social Security trust fund will be completely exhausted by 2042-or there abouts..if this doesnt worry you, what the hell does????

I guess the Democrats will have to fix it as usual...

hell the democrats can't even fix my toliet. In fact they're responsible for it backing up half the time it does because of their dumbass water conservation bill which cut the volume of water allowed in new toliet tanks.

Reeds we're in a war and coming out of a recession. Deficit spending is only a short term measure to help things get back on track and then it will be discontinued, unless the dems stonewall it in the senate. Of course if we let the terrorist kill a few million baby boomers by not providing adequate defense, I guess we wouldn't have to worry about so many eldery. However, I personaly detest that solution as would the few million who would die as would most Americans.

Seems like all you can do is bitch and moan about how things are without providing any pratical alternative.

[Mavdog]

[quote]
Originally posted by: LRB

hell the democrats can't even fix my toliet. In fact they're responsible for it backing up half the time it does because of their dumbass water conservation bill which cut the volume of water allowed in new toliet tanks.

odd, sounds like a plumbing problem to me. My toilets work fine... maybe it's the volume of crap in yours [img]i/expressions/anim_laugh.gif[/img]
(LRB you just set it up so well I had to)

Reeds we're in a war and coming out of a recession. Deficit spending is only a short term measure to help things get back on track and then it will be discontinued, unless the dems stonewall it in the senate. Of course if we let the terrorist kill a few million baby boomers by not providing adequate defense, I guess we wouldn't have to worry about so many eldery. However, I personaly detest that solution as would the few million who would die as would most Americans.

Seems like all you can do is bitch and moan about how things are without providing any pratical alternative.

here's an alternative; don't spend so much, and don't go around looking for a country to invade to spend an additional $300 billion or so.

[dude1394]

Originally posted by: reeds
Dude- you better rethink what you said- that you dont have an issue with the deficit...Greenspan disagrees, and he is one very smart man...
Greenspan has warned in the past that a rising budget deficit can cause interest rates to go up and could jeopardize the nation's long-term economic health.

By the time all Baby Boomers retire in 2030, the United States will have twice as many elderly folk as it does now. Meanwhile, the number of workers paying for their benefits will increase by just 18 percent.
If things continue as they're going, the Social Security trust fund will be completely exhausted by 2042-or there abouts..if this doesnt worry you, what the hell does????

I guess the Democrats will have to fix it as usual...

Reeds you'd better re-think your aversion to tax cuts since greenspan also supports those. Greenspan doesn't believe in a lot of debt HOWEVER he doesn't believe in lowering it by raising taxes but by lowering spending.

Can't cherry-pick old greenspan now.

If the democrats didn't demagoge social secuirty for so many years then maybe we could do something about fixing it, as it is however we will have to drag them kicking and screaming to fix it just like welfare reform.

Not good for the old vote-getting machine that those uppity citizens should own their own pensions now. What would a good democrat do without money to pass around.

Also you need to realize that there IS NO TRUST FUND. NO LOCKBOX... There would be if there were private accounts but with the current social security ponzi scheme we have all we have is promises. I don't expect to ever see a penny.

[dude1394]

here's an alternative; don't spend so much, and don't go around looking for a country to invade to spend an additional $300 billion or so.

True we could just wait for another 9/11 and see what happens. That WOULD be the "strategy" if the irresponsible dem party.

[Mavdog]

uh huh. the deficits are making us safer from attacks? that makes absolutely no sense.

In as much that iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, your attempt to link the two fails to make any sense either.

but I know that won't stop you from trying...

[Mavdog]

Originally posted by: dude1394
If the democrats didn't demagoge social secuirty for so many years then maybe we could do something about fixing it, as it is however we will have to drag them kicking and screaming to fix it just like welfare reform.

Not good for the old vote-getting machine that those uppity citizens should own their own pensions now. What would a good democrat do without money to pass around.

Also you need to realize that there IS NO TRUST FUND. NO LOCKBOX... There would be if there were private accounts but with the current social security ponzi scheme we have all we have is promises. I don't expect to ever see a penny.

it is a failure by both parties that the social security trust fund is underfunded and not on better standing. How long have repubs controlled congress? and now that they have a majority in the senate for 4 years now, what's your excuse? "it's the dems fault" is not accurate at all.

Bush pledged to not touch the social security receipts, but then he did. oh, I forgot, that's not a flip flop...

Privitizing social security will not fill the "lockbox" and in fact will harm the efforts to fill the trust fund. If many young workers opt out to place their contributions into private accounts, their needed contributions won't go into the fund to make it solvent. you're absolutely incorrect.

[LRB]

Originally posted by: Mavdog




here's an alternative; don't spend so much, and don't go around looking for a country to invade to spend an additional $300 billion or so.

OK, the old bury our head in the sand routine and do nothing. Things will surely just miraculously get better. The Democratic Fairy tale plan.

[reeds]

"Bush pledged to not touch the social security receipts, but then he did. oh, I forgot, that's not a flip flop..."


LOL..of course its not a flip flop..its only a flip flop if a DEMOCRAT does it...

[dude1394]

Bush pledged to not touch the social security receipts, but then he did. oh, I forgot, that's not a flip flop...

Surprised that you would pull a modowd on this md as you are pretty good at parsing. I seem to remember it was qualifed a little bit like, war, recession, things of that nature.

Privitizing social security will not fill the "lockbox" and in fact will harm the efforts to fill the trust fund. If many young workers opt out to place their contributions into private accounts, their needed contributions won't go into the fund to make it solvent. you're absolutely incorrect.

WHAT trust fund dude? You are as deluded as gore was. You rag on "both" parties about this all the while demogagoues have been using the "third rail" to get elected for years. Bush and the republicans (like on so many other issues) have had the courage to being talking about structural changes to decades old policies.

But dems are the party of the status quo. Just like the europeans are having to deal with their failed social policies, we will have to drag the dems to fix 'em. They will yell like stuck pigs the whole way. But the serious party will just keep on trying. Who is john galt anyway?

[Mavdog]

Originally posted by: dude1394

Surprised that you would pull a modowd on this md as you are pretty good at parsing. I seem to remember it was qualifed a little bit like, war, recession, things of that nature

Actually not, the White House had stated that all his budgets took into account a recession. Here's his first quote, which is after the recession had been noted:
"We're going to keep the promise of Social Security and keep the government from raiding the Social Security surplus." [President Bush, 3/3/01]

"the president's new budget uses Social Security surpluses to pay for other programs every year through 2013, ultimately diverting more than $1.4 trillion in Social Security funds to other purposes." [The New York Times, 2/6/02]

mavdog said; Privitizing social security will not fill the "lockbox" and in fact will harm the efforts to fill the trust fund. If many young workers opt out to place their contributions into private accounts, their needed contributions won't go into the fund to make it solvent. you're absolutely incorrect.

WHAT trust fund dude? You are as deluded as gore was. You rag on "both" parties about this all the while demogagoues have been using the "third rail" to get elected for years. Bush and the republicans (like on so many other issues) have had the courage to being talking about structural changes to decades old policies.[/quote]

there is a trust, it isn't funded. The budgets since Bush took office have "borrowed" from the fund. I'm surprised you didn't know that.

From your failure to address my point that privitazation will deplete an already tenous flow of money means you must not have any rebuttal.

But dems are the party of the status quo. Just like the europeans are having to deal with their failed social policies, we will have to drag the dems to fix 'em. They will yell like stuck pigs the whole way. But the serious party will just keep on trying. Who is john galt anyway?

I sure haven't seen any republican attempts to "drag" social security anywhere. except of course into the current budget monies being spent otherwhere.

[Dooby]

OK. So I am sitting in this rather stuffy old office in DC listening to a Congressional Research Service give a lecture sometine in April 1997. Subject turned to the national debt and the deficit. And let me get this out of the way: first, it was a bipartisan lecture, and second the folks at the CRS never change regardless of who has the majority in congress. The budget, if I recall, was not "balanced" at that point, if I recall correctly.

I put "balanced" in quotes because Madape and Mavdog are stupidly arguing over nothing. While technically the budget may be balanced in the sense that revenues exceeded expenditures, from a legal or accounting standpoint , the budget was never balanced. Why? Non-social security revenues never exceeded non-social security expeditures; the budget was only balanced to the extent social security revenues were included. That is to say that the social security trust fund continued to purchase new T-bills, i.e. the gov't borrowed more money, but from itself. In fact, this has been a clever legal fiction that continued dating back to Johnson: because social security revenues were always included with non-social security revenues, the deficit has always been much greater than ever described in the media. If a lawyer used this accounting, he'd get disbarred; a banker would be thrown in jail. So to rip on Bush for taking money out of the SS trust fund is foolish, because everybody did it; and that is what bugged me about Gore's "lockbox" when he quietly benefited from the same system as VP and a legislator. But I have digressed way too far.

Many events caused the balancing of the budget, most of which were caused by Republicans for the most part. The first was the deregulation of the savings and loan industry. Then came the 1986 tax reform bill, which not only cut tax rates, but eliminated several tax loopholes. The effect of the elimination of these tax loopholes was the creation of literally millions of "taxable events" as the IRS puts it, which strained the financial health of millions of americans and forced those holding real estate in partnerships to capture the depreciation on a current basis to place that real estate on the market, which in turn hurt the real estate market while at the same time the oil markets were slumping and the overextended savings and loans crashed. In order to bail out the savings and loans, congress created the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), which literally sucked up hundreds of billions of dollars of the federal budget over a several year period. The RTC would ultimately be disbanded in 1996.

The next thing was the 1990 budget deal. In the 1990 budget deal, which for the most part caused the end of the Bush presidency, had a rather bizaare clause in it: tax cuts or spending increases had to be "paid for" the bill to be allowed on the house floor. That is to say you couldn't cut taxes without a corresponding cut in spending somewhere else, and you couldn't spend more on an existing or new program without a corresponding cut in spending elsewhere or raising taxes. This law continued in effect until the budget was to be "balanced". The effect of this, bearing in mind that one of the government's largest expenditures, the RTC, was gradually being phased out, meant that the budget would gradually become balanced all by itself. If you believe John Sununu, the Pres. Chief of Staff at the time, this was 100% intentional.

Wow, I have just about balanced the budget without mentioning Clinton. So Clinton gets elected and raises taxes in 1993. That act plus the dot-com boom "balanced" the budget a year, maybe two, ahead of schedule. But it was going to happen. It was just about as close to a mathmatical certainy as you can get in politics.