Liberals Ideas for Cutting the Deficit...

Bfgrn said:
READ THE ARTICLE...this is a conservative economist who says it isn't.

We are in the middle of an economic bust that had a decade of wealth for a tiny segment of the population.
Click to expand...

James K. Galbraith is a liberal. Why do you keep getting the terms liberal and conservative mixed up?

No matter though, the numbers are what they are, plain and simple. Just look at the chart.
 
Rana said:
I thought they were suppose to be creating jobs, not eliminating them!

How foolish, think of the trickle down from the loss of 700,000 jobs.
Click to expand...

It's going to be okay... You see, those 700k can always find a job in the oil drilling industry when we start drilling our own oil again!!
 
I've went over this many times before. It's relatively easy to come up with a plan that gets the deficit down to at least sustainable levels.

"Sustainable" here meaning that even though we're still technically taking on debt, debt as a % of GDP goes down.
 
Dixie said:
First off, let us understand the perspective of reality in which we currently find ourselves as a nation. We are $13 trillion in debt, and this has been growing at a rate of $1 trillion per year, over the past several years.
Click to expand...

Actually it was only over a trillion in 2009 and 2010, and I wouldn't expect it to be over a trillion this year, especially with a split government.
 
SmarterThanYou said:
50% might be a bit much, but i'm all on board with 25% for military, as well as 10% minimum across the board for every single agency under the federal government.
Click to expand...

Congrats! You've reduced the federal budget by 10%. We will still be $900 billion over budget... keep cutting!

You see, I don't think people understand the amounts of money we are talking about here. I think it is like Charlie Sheen, we can't process it! lol

Take the Liberals proposals, gut the military... hell, eliminate the military budget entirely! Congrats... you're saving us about $600 bil a year! Couple in the GOP's enthusiastic and optimistic goal to reduce the deficit by $100 bil, something the Liberals are screaming is "draconian" ...but cut that too! There! You've cut $700 billion... still another $300 billion to go to get to a balanced budget... and while you're trying to figure out what else can be cut, you might want to plan for what we do when someone attacks us with no military, because that is surely going to happen at some point. You'll also need to figure out what to do with all those MILLIONS of people who depend on defense contracts for a job, they will be unemployed. Also... not to load you down too much, but... you'll need to have a plan for the hundreds of small towns across America, who's economic base is solely dependent on the military base, which you're closing.
 
Damn Yankee said:
All these social programs of the FDR and LBJ era were predicated on the belief that we would continue to grow economically.
Click to expand...

Not really. Social securities main problem is the fact that some generations are larger than others. This will actually probably help us in the future, as population growth stabilizes, after we get through the boomers. But since the boomers decided to spend their surpluses on themselves rather than put it in a trust fund to fund their social security later, I think we should respond by cutting the amount of money they get from social security.

The primary problem with Medicaid and Medicare is that health costs are growing so fast, but if you get rid of them Americans are just going to have to shoulder the costs privately. When you need healthcare treatment, you need healthcare treatment. The only way to spend less on it is to not treat some people who need it.

Damn Yankee said:
The fact is that the US is not growing at the rates that we have gotten used to in the 1950's through the 1980's. Yes our population continues to to increase but it has not been the highly educated immigration of the past
Click to expand...

Maybe during the period of extremely restricted immigration (it was difficult for anyone who wasn't from a wealth European nation to immigrate) from the 20's to the 60's. In the 1800's we got many uneducated immigrants.
 
Last edited:
Dixie said:
Congrats! You've reduced the federal budget by 10%. We will still be $900 billion over budget... keep cutting!
Click to expand...

The most likely thing that's going to pull us out of deficits is increased tax revenues from when the economy recovered. A 10% cut to the federal government is enough to put the deficit in such a situation at at somewhat reasonable levels, although you still need more to get to sustainable or balanced budgets.
 
NigelTufnel said:
The House Republican proposed cuts would result in an estimated loss of 700,000 jobs. Cutting the budget at all right now it fucking stupid.
Click to expand...

We don't necessarily need to cut the budget immediately, but a long term plan that balances the budget is necessary. And it needs to be something there is a wide consensus on.

We had this fixed in the 1990's, and it was agreed to on a bipartisan level. Then a different faction of the Republican party took control and they decided to waste it all on wars and tax cuts.
 
Glorious Watermark XVII said:
We don't necessarily need to cut the budget immediately, but a long term plan that balances the budget is necessary. And it needs to be something there is a wide consensus on.

We had this fixed in the 1990's, and it was agreed to on a bipartisan level. Then a different faction of the Republican party took control and they decided to waste it all on wars and tax cuts.
Click to expand...

There was a ton of momentum in the '90's for fiscal responsibility. It went out the window w/ the Bush years.

Gore had a good project going called "reinventing government," which was a lot of little ways to reduce bureacracy & waste without wholesale cutting of programs - it was making some real headway. But they just trashed it in 2001; along with a commitment to balanced budgets & no deficit spending...
 
This is great... so you have no problem with us rolling back spending levels to 1990? That's terrific news! We might actually be able to work together if you have adopted that perspective!!
 
Dixie said:
This is great... so you have no problem with us rolling back spending levels to 1990?
Click to expand...

Now is different than 1990 (there's also been inflation, population growth, etc..). You can't just cut medicare back to 1990 levels, for instance. Doctors would refuse to see those patients because they just wouldn't be worth it. It would be like trying to save money by only paying 50% of your power bill. The power company would respond by cutting 100% of your power.
 
Gore had a good project going called "reinventing government," which was a lot of little ways to reduce bureacracy & waste without wholesale cutting of programs -
Click to expand...

Again, as I said in the OP, we can revisit the past, we can debate who should have prevailed in their arguments back then, and get lost in meaningless debate of things that no longer matter, or we can focus on the problem at hand.

We didn't do as Gore wanted to do, we went another direction. The current administration was determined to make Keynesian economics work, if they had to break the bank trying. It hasn't worked. We've doubled our debt, lost our retirement, and still owe the Chinese more than we can ever hope to repay, unless we get spending under control and start paying down our debt. There really isn't another way out now. Maybe Gore could have saved us? Maybe he had the most brilliant idea? Doesn't matter, it's not where we went, and it doesn't apply to where we are at now.

It took us over 200 years as a nation, to amass $1 trillion in debt, we hit that under Reagan. Between Reagan and Obama, we increased it another $2 trillion. In two years, Obama has increased it to $13 trillion, and our debt grows at a rate of $1 trillion per year. This dramatic increase in the national debt is unsustainable, and everyone under the sun, not in some mental institution or needing to be, agrees with that point.
 
Dixie said:
Again, as I said in the OP, we can revisit the past, we can debate who should have prevailed in their arguments back then, and get lost in meaningless debate of things that no longer matter, or we can focus on the problem at hand.

We didn't do as Gore wanted to do, we went another direction. The current administration was determined to make Keynesian economics work, if they had to break the bank trying. It hasn't worked. We've doubled our debt, lost our retirement, and still owe the Chinese more than we can ever hope to repay, unless we get spending under control and start paying down our debt. There really isn't another way out now. Maybe Gore could have saved us? Maybe he had the most brilliant idea? Doesn't matter, it's not where we went, and it doesn't apply to where we are at now.

It took us over 200 years as a nation, to amass $1 trillion in debt, we hit that under Reagan. Between Reagan and Obama, we increased it another $2 trillion. In two years, Obama has increased it to $13 trillion, and our debt grows at a rate of $1 trillion per year. This dramatic increase in the national debt is unsustainable, and everyone under the sun, not in some mental institution or needing to be, agrees with that point.
Click to expand...

I agree that's it's unsustainable, and have more than a mild interest in seeing America get its fiscal house in order. Our undoing lies in the growing debt.

But, I also have a kitchen sink approach. You can't look at a pie chart of spending & expect to have a meaningful conversation about cutting spending that does not include slashing the military budget significantly. I also think privatizing SS has to be on the table. And yes, I'm all for revisiting the past when it's revisiting something that looked like it was working - such as Gore's reinventing gov't project. We can call it something new, but there is a ridiculous amount of waste in our current system; the little bits & pieces you can eliminate on their own don't amount to much, but put it all together, and it adds up....
 
Onceler said:
I agree that's it's unsustainable, and have more than a mild interest in seeing America get its fiscal house in order. Our undoing lies in the growing debt.

But, I also have a kitchen sink approach. You can't look at a pie chart of spending & expect to have a meaningful conversation about cutting spending that does not include slashing the military budget significantly. I also think privatizing SS has to be on the table. And yes, I'm all for revisiting the past when it's revisiting something that looked like it was working - such as Gore's reinventing gov't project. We can call it something new, but there is a ridiculous amount of waste in our current system; the little bits & pieces you can eliminate on their own don't amount to much, but put it all together, and it adds up....
Click to expand...

Absolutely, we have to look at EVERYTHING, nothing is sacred any more! Not even the conservatives precious military!

We have to proceed with caution though people, every cut means job losses somewhere for someone! I know Boehner doesn't care, but part of the reason the Tea Timers won was because the promise to create jobs while cutting spending! I want to see the Republicans pull off this miracle in the worst way, mostly because the USA needs it, but they can't do it! They won't do it, they haven't done it! They plan to make the economy worse before it gets better to win the 2012 election! They are going to hurt a lot of people to win the White House! Just watch!
 
Rana said:
We have to proceed with caution though people, every cut means job losses somewhere for someone! I know Boehner doesn't care, but part of the reason the Tea Timers won was because the promise to create jobs while cutting spending!
Click to expand...
the promise of creating jobs wasn't intended to create government jobs. A government job does nothing but subtract from the budget because they produce nothing.
 
Onceler said:
I agree that's it's unsustainable, and have more than a mild interest in seeing America get its fiscal house in order. Our undoing lies in the growing debt.

But, I also have a kitchen sink approach. You can't look at a pie chart of spending & expect to have a meaningful conversation about cutting spending that does not include slashing the military budget significantly. I also think privatizing SS has to be on the table. And yes, I'm all for revisiting the past when it's revisiting something that looked like it was working - such as Gore's reinventing gov't project. We can call it something new, but there is a ridiculous amount of waste in our current system; the little bits & pieces you can eliminate on their own don't amount to much, but put it all together, and it adds up....
Click to expand...

Good, it sounds like you've come a long way to being conservative! I was jut going to mention, Gore's "Reinventing Government" approach, sounds like a really great idea... I bet we could probably find oh... about $100 billion in things that are a waste, which can be cut right away....oh wait, that's exactly what Boehner and Bachmann want to do!

With regard for cuts in military spending, I am not opposed to sensible cuts across the board. I think our military budget is full of unnecessary redundancy, and bloated bureaucratic inefficiency, so I believe very much in the "Al Gore" approach here, let's analyze what we can cut in terms of waste. The only thing we need to all keep in mind, when it comes to talk of MAJOR cuts in military spending, that always means bases will close. This will turn many-a-middle-class town into Deadwood... nothing but ghost towns. This will mean the closing of many industries like Hughes Corporation in LaGrange, GA. or Martin-Marietta in Marietta, GA. Layoffs, people becoming unemployed as a result of the cuts in military spending. There is an entire support structure in the private sector, which is fueled by the military, and certainly has a dramatic economic impact on our nation as a whole.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top