The Congressional Budget Office released numbers showing the annual budget deficit will exceed $1 trillion in 2012. And we can thank the extension of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2010 for more than a third of that deficit. If we really want to do something about the deficit – then it’s time we roll back the Reagan tax cuts – and also end the capital gains loophole so that people like Mitt Romney and Paris Hilton will have to start paying their fair share in taxes.
"Renaissance Thinking About the Issues of Our Day"
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We need to do the last 30 years over Thom and I think most on this board would agree. The corporations and the rich have gotten their way and they still bitch about paying too much, too much regulation while everyone else has waited for the trickling down to begin. They have sold whom ever they can down the river for the almighty dollar. Everyone around here knows what they have done to this country and also know we'll never pay the debt off they have given us. Somebody sure is getting rich off of all that interest we are paying everyyear.
At some point, the illegitimate debt will have to be 'forgiven' and the ill-gotten gains taken back in the process. It is the way it has always worked, and there is no moral point to be made to hold people accountable or to suffer to make this metaphysics work. It is a crime, and you don't fix a crime with another crime. Sorry guys, but immoral debt is primarily the fault of the lender who is buying souls with money.
I doubt we need to go back before Bush. After all, the budget was balanced under Clinton - or nearly so.
And also, why do we need to spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined? How paranoid do you have to be?
Conservatives are always screaming for smaller government and I think that there is a good case to be made for getting rid of unnecessary and duplicative government bureaucracy as a way to help contain the deficit, here's a good place to start (just for example):
The United States Intelligence Community (IC) is a cooperative federation of 16 separate United States government agencies that work separately and together to conduct intelligence activities considered necessary for the conduct of foreign relations and the protection of the national security of the United States. Member organizations of the IC include intelligence agencies, military intelligence, and civilian intelligence and analysis offices within federal executive departments. The IC is led by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who reports to the President of the United States.
Among their varied responsibilities, the members of the Community collect and produce foreign and domestic intelligence, contribute to military planning, and perform espionage. The IC was established by Executive Order 12333, signed on December 4, 1981 by President Ronald Reagan
The Washington Post has reported that there are 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations in the United States that are working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence, and that the intelligence community as a whole includes 854,000 people who hold top-secret clearances. According to a 2008 study by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, private contractors make up 29% of the workforce in the US intelligence community and cost the equivalent of 49% of their personnel budgets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Community
Good target. The CIA is bad enough, but now every branch thinks it needs its own version in order to be up to date on imperial fashion. We do need to appreciate that the real function of our secrecy is to keep Americans from knowing what 'we' are doing. It is hard to believe that the other side does not have its sources or does not notice what is happening to themselves or who is doing it. If anything, it allows their secretists to pull the same crap on their citizens, as in Iran. The American people and the Iranian people ought to be the best of friends.
Return to the Reagan era tax rates of 1982, & the budget is balanced.
Not only did Obama extend the Bush tax cuts, he even ladeled some more gravy onto the plate of the super-rich:
Bush and the GOP Congress were content to give rich people $3.5 million free of the estate tax, and tax the rest at a top rate of 45%.
Obama gave rich people $5 million free, and tax the rest at a top rate of $35%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States
So if you die with $6 million, Obama gave you $775k. (1,125,000 - 350,000)
And if you die with more than $6 million, you get more and more and more...
Stamp out a trillion dollar platinum, coin, hand it over to the Fed, and cancel a trillion bucks worth of debt.
That was a proposal made by several world class economists during the so-called "debt crises".
The Constitution gives government the authority to do that. The Founding Fathers weren't twits. Of course, had they known we'd give monetary policy over to private banksters, they may not have bothered.
The way it works now, if government wants to add another dollar to the money supply, it first has to borrow the non-existent dollar from a banker before it can print it.
The bankster uses fractional reserve banking to credit the government account with the non-existent money. Government can then print the money...bring it into existence....and pay a bankster interest for the privilege of doing so.
Constitutionally, government doesn't have to borrow all money into existence...it can simply create it as Lincoln did..
Retired Monk - "Ideology is a disease"
Obama's attempt to defuse the irrational hate and ideological rigidity of his Congressional opponents may have let things continue pathologically, but the political option to do otherwise has not really been there. We may hate that. We may stamp our feet and howl, but if it becomes the educable moment, we need to appreciate that reason and fact are not going to win the day without a process of change.
Elect Ron Paul in 2012......
Stop the un-Constitutional Wars.....
Shut down un-necessary government agencies....
Then you have a balacned budget.
It's real simple.
Good target. The CIA is bad enough, but now every branch thinks it needs its own version in order to be up to date on imperial fashion. We do need to appreciate that the real function of our secrecy is to keep Americans from knowing what 'we' are doing. It is hard to believe that the other side does not have its sources or does not notice what is happening to themselves or who is doing it. If anything, it allows their secretists to pull the same crap on their citizens, as in Iran. The American people and the Iranian people ought to be the best of friends.
I'm with yuo on this DRC and the thought that we are best of friends,IMO, is rooted in a deep place we all share. Some have maps and access to this place some don't. Here's the rub that's quite crazy making. We are all friends all related but we are to pretend we are enimies, and we are not to know we are pretending. We are supposed to be and have independence/freedom and it is taken away at the same time and we are not to comment on it.
Perhaps taxes are too low:
"......federal tax receipts as a percentage GDP are the lowest since the 1950s, referred to as ‘Starving the Beast’ by Supply Side republicans."
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/03/third-world-capitalism/
Retired Monk - "Ideology is a disease"
Taxes have been "too low" but unchanged from 2003 to 2012.
The economy is bigger.
Military spending is lower.
The stimulus is over.
What is causing this year's deficit?