What innacuracies are you upset about?

And I don't have a side on this issue, nor in general. I have sides on issues, but I don't think I'd fall into the tight box that both sides seem to have which consistently change depending on who is in office.

Because destroying the New Deal and creating a Randian wonderland is more important than deficit reduction.

I think Republicans are under much more pressure from their base now that Obama is in office. Democrats also scare pretty easily when pressure is put on from the other side.

I'm not upset? What makes you say that? (Then I'll read the rest of your post. :) )

Who says they won't, though? I see this as more of a used car negotiation where, you won't find out the lowest price somebody will take until you essentially walk away (or at least have the other side believe you will).

But I don't chalk it up to the Dems not playing poker as well...I see it as they choose to use the negotiation tactics to score points while the Repubs choose to use it to show their base they "aren't like the 2000-2006 R's". In the end...both sides will cave and some compromise will be reached.

Otherwise...I'm not paying my mortgage either. :)

So it's okay to make up an argument or tug at emotions to support that (or not support it?).

All the deficit reduction projections from both sides assume a ten year window. That's a long standing Congressional budgeting rule.

As to your point, I really don't understand why anyone would favor a crisis now when the crisis in the future doesn't have to happen at all.

I don't care if you do. You don't seem to be able to comprehend much as it is.

I'll admit my phrasing is over the top, but the plan to drown the government in debt to force a crisis that severely cripples the role of government has been discussed openly by all sorts of Republicans over the past couple of decades. The Norquist no tax pledge is all about "starving the beast".

I'm not totally evil. :)

As you said though, it's "scoring points" on an issue that is incredibly important. It's not a used car negotiation, it's a game of chicken in two high speed cars by individuals trying to impress the pretty girl watching.

Agreed, that's why I was asking questions. STOP DODGING ME LIKE THIS IS A SPORT!!! :)

I really don't have any problems with you being concerned about any of what you are saying here. We should be questioning the logic of any and all of this, it's a mess.

I hope so. I'm beginning to doubt it though, every move is seemingly designed to worsen the economy while playing the blame game. You even see it in the latest move where they want to abrogate their responsibilities and make it the President's problem because they can't see a deal that passes the House and they don't "want co-ownership of a bad economy"

Too bad boys, you're already there (Personally, I think they are more responsible 55/45 ish, but that just be my independent-to-D leanings)

Not pointing at you specifically, although I admit we're probably on different sides of this.

Pointing more to the fact that whenever the phrase "the American people..." gets uttered in a political context, it almost never is used to mean, literally, the body politic. It refers to "the people with whom I am in ideological agreement."

Or, perhaps, "the people with whom I want to believe are in ideological agreement with me." In Washington, the two are sometimes confused.

I wouldn't disagree at all. And depending on your view of what the Republican party "should" stand for...they might be even more to blame for the mess as they are supposed to be the party of small government that acts as the counterbalance to the Dems and their social engineering (to put it simplistically). Unfortunately (imo) the Repubs decided to reverse engineer the social aspects and not act as a barrier to government intrusion & expansion...so here we are.

I'm less optimistic that the Repubs will solve any real issues related to the economy, however, besides raising the debt limit & hopefully pulling spending inline to a more sustainable level(not to be confused with a good plan, per say).

My optimistic view at this point is to hope the Repubs at least are able to pull in spending, make the business climate less uncertain, and then wait for the Dems to get voted in to (hopefully) be the party to launch an ambitious plan for energy independence. Or at least thats the pipe dream.

I'm not sure how much blame one can lay at the feet of the current crop of Republican Congressmen, unless you want to argue the point that the economy would be improved without the stonewalling of Republican Senators for two years.

On the other hand, the Republican Congress during W's administration drastically increased defense expenditures in the form of two major conflicts at the same time as they voted for sundry tax cuts.

One or the other might have been defensible, but not both.

If you look at the first budget George W. Bush submitted, for FY 2002, included about $2.05 trillion in spending with intake of $1.95 trillion. The Iraq war hadn't yet begun and the Afghanistan war would have been in its infancy. So we're talking about a $100 billion deficit, which is small potatoes, comparatively speaking.

The final budget he submitted, for FY 2009, was around $3.1 trillion. The government took in about $2.1 trillion in revenue - a net increase of about $150 billion over his first budget, while spending increased by 50%. Wikipedia says the final deficit that year was about $1.4 trillion, and I'd guess the $350bn in TARP spending probably accounts for the remainder of the difference between $2.1tn and $3.1tn. But even leaving that out, the size of the federal deficit was 1000% larger in President Bush's final budget than in his first. I mean, that's massive. President Obama would need to submit an FY 2017 budget with deficits of around $15 trillion to accomplish that.

President Obama's budgets for FY 2010 and FY 2011 included greater deficits than that of the FY 2009 budget. That's absolutely true. It's also absolutely true that federal income has been basically flat between FY 2002 and the current situation, and that we're only tentatively emerging from the shadow of a pretty goddamn significant financial crisis.

So lost in all of the tea party outrage over the budget situation right now is just exactly how it GOT to that point. Tax cuts without the wars, we're not looking at $1.5 trillion annual deficits. The wars without tax cuts, and we're still probably not looking at $1.5 trillion annual deficits. Both of them together, plus the question of what the government's proper role is when the country takes an economic shit? Yeah.

And, yeah, that's not sustainable. But to bring it back full circle, I'd say that it's not a two-way split of the blame; it's more like 3-way.

The plurality of it has to go to the Republican Congresses of 2000-2006.

What's left depends on how you want to parse it. Do you want to blame the Democrats for spending money in 2009-10, or do you want to blame Republicans from stonewalling efforts at trying to get the economy running again?

I'm not even gonna blame President Bush on this one. He submitted the budget, but the House still has the power of the purse, and some of the budgets when President Bush was in office wound up being greater than his requests, because Congress was in the throes of patriotic madness where not voting for more funding than requested was the same thing as cutting spending, hating troops, kicking puppies and giving Osama bin Laden sloppy head.

The current crop of Congresspeople certainly have their culpability, but the smoking gun points right at the 107th, 108th and 109th Congress.

I personally don't think its either the Democrat or Republican fault alone - its the fault of the political system (combined with an short-termist entitlement mentality which has been engendered on the population as a whole).

The situation hasn't happened overnight, its been a build up of the country living beyond its means for decades, its only now that its becoming increasingly visible that something has to be done about it really - see my analogy earlier about a family with a credit card, you can only make minimum payments and run it up for so long before you have to start the painful process of paying it down.

To complete the circle and start another circle, because if Washington puts a bandaid on this and doesn't REALLY change their spending habits, it WILL happen. Those threatening a crisis now are trying to ensure the one in the future doesn't have to happen, but if you think we can continue to survive with budgets that commit $3.8 trillion in spending with only $2.2 trillion in revenue pretty much ever, well, you're wrong.

Don't forget it's taken the threat of the crisis to get the Dems to even talk spending reductions that remotely approach what is actually needed. And $400 billion/year in spending cuts (based on your $4 trillion over 10 years) is probably half what's actually needed here. So maybe the Repubs are holding ground because the biggest spending cut option on the table from the Dems still isn't enough?

I will concede that the answer might be defense cuts to take that much closer, so it may be Repubs blocking that from going higher, but regardless none of the 3 options listed goes far enough.

don't forget the peace dividend that will be coming from the US getting out of Iraq/Afghanistan, or at least severley lowering their expenditure there,

Yup. This conversation started in the early 80s, picked up steam in the 90s (see the entire H Ross Perot campaign), got hidden by a sham of prosperity in the 2000s (see all the economic fraud cases ending with the near collapse at the end of Bush II), and is now home to roost. None of these guys have fixed this, including the Dems when they had the Presidency and all of Congress under their control.

I will also agree with this. Very disappointed in how the Repubs handled the purse strings when they had their chance. They could have fixed this back then, but chose not to, just like the Dems a year or two ago.

Which is why I think it's going to take tactics like are currently being undertaken to actually get someone to make the cuts that are so desperately needed.

The GOP doesn't want to go to 4 trillion right now because that would have to include tax increases.

Even with what you have stated, I still don't understand why you'd want a crisis now. Why not give in a little and start to solve the structural deficit? That's the part I don't get. There are options for dealing with the deficit. The Dems are willing to cut what would have been considered a mountain of spending just four years ago, but the GOP won't give an inch on new taxes. That's because they don't really give a damn about the deficit. It's just a tool to use to radically alter the size of government. If the deal is solve the deficit, but increase taxes they almost all prefer to live with a huge deficit.

They didn't have anything to fix. They just had to leave the Clinton tax rates in place and find a way to pay for Medicare D. Even the added defense expenses wouldn't have killed us.

But the debt crisis has been part of the plan for decades. That's why people like Greenspan could say that a balanced budget showed a need for massive tax cuts that would explode the deficit. The deficit is just a tool to use to repeal as much of the New Deal as possible.

So...two years in the mid-90s when the deficit was significantly smaller (granted, an easier job of it then, assuming that none of the later structural implosion happens), or two years in the aftermath of a significant financial crisis when every economist who had the President's ear was telling him that massive spending cuts would exacerbate the problem, and the Republicans in the Senate were forcing cloture votes on every bill to come to the floor.

I'll grant you that they SHOULD have tackled it in the 90s.

I'm not certain they COULD have tackled it in 2009/10, even had they wanted to, though whether they wanted to is another question entirely.

Because that's the last 3 decades or so. No real change at all. I'm all for Congress pulling their heads out of their butts and showing some real fiscal responsibility to avert this crisis, but I'm not very hopeful. The three choices are:

1. Big crisis now, forcing real change to dig us out.
2. Worse crisis later, forcing real change to dig us out.
3. Real change now before the crisis hits.

I'm all for #3, but would rather have #1 than #2. I just don't think our national politicians have what it takes to implement #3. I would love to be surprised.

Debt fallback plan gains momentum as GOP plans symbolic votes - CNN.com

And here comes option 2. Sigh.

Yeah. That's such a sad and cynical end to this. Basically, no one can agree to solve the problem, so the "solution" the two parties devise is a system to spread the political blame.

I am still stupid and naive enough to have really hoped for the grand bargain. $4 trillion in deficit reduction--3/4 of which would be spending cuts, including cuts to entitlements--would have been awesome.

Yup, #2 was their only choice. The greed and backroom deals will never stop, so it will always be #2.
They'll also do this again when we go through the next financial crisis around 2020-2023. Come 2030, or a few years later, there will be no #2 option left and it will be the end of this country as we know it.

And that's why I preferred the crisis now, we could at least survive it, although with the magnitude this may have been iffy. Not sure we'll be able to survive it in a few years...

Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll come to their senses over the next few years and actually fix this mess. I can pray for that at least.

Note to self: Be fluent in Mandarin by 2030.

We need more of these proposals. If you get three or four different proposals of this magnitude, you can take pieces of each one and create a bill that's truly going to do something worthwhile. Kudos to Coburn for pushing this kind of bill.

Coburn Ups Ante in Debt Ceiling Standoff, Pushes Plan to Save $9 Trillion - FoxNews.com

Sounds like that has potential ... as long as those pieces don't include tax increases (or stealth increases like the ones included here) ... and as long as the approx. $1t from defense is itemized, reasonable, and does nothing to inhibit national security.

OMG IT'S A TRILLION DOLLAR TAX HIKE!!!1@1

God forbid you should own seven homes like Frank McCourt and not be able to deduct the interest on six of them.

The story lists 2.5 trillion. Where does the other 6.5 trillion come from?

Assuming that McCourt has paid as much in taxes as I suspect he has, until the day comes when punitive methods such as progressive taxation are eliminated then the more deductions the merrier afaic.

This doesn't itemize but it does seem to give a better idea of where some of the rest is coming from (over a 10 year period)

Coburn Budget Plan Proposes $9 Trillion in Cuts - NYTimes.com

It includes regular increases in Medicare premiums and a 15% reduction in the federal workforce.

Oh, hey, guess what?

The McCourts made $108 million between 2004-09.

How much tax do you think they paid on that?

Hint: I paid more last year than they paid in all five years combined. The wealthy and their advocates on the taxation issue are cordially invited to take their complaints and cram them up their collective assholes, sideways.

Dola,

I really don't care what you think about what the tax rates are or should be.

But when you're calling the elimination of tax deductions a 'stealth tax increase' on people who pulled down 9 figures and paid exactly ZERO taxes in a five year period, your sense of priorities are seriously fucked up. By all means, bitch about taxes, but let's make sure the people you're white-knighting for are actually paying taxes first before you go all Grover Norquist, okay?

McCourt didn't pay payroll taxes on employees?

Or on profits from the Dodg ...oh, wait, maybe that one isn't the best example ;)

Payroll taxes on employees are generally assumed to be taken out of employee wages, not owner profits.

That $108 million wasn't "this is what the Dodgers made."

That's "this is what the McCourts claimed in personal income." As in, income they paid themselves for running the team as President/CEO/etc.

{foghorn leghorn on} It was a joke son, a funny as it were {/foghorn}

This.

It looks good and is one of the few ideas that is addressing all the problems from Senior entitlements to Defense spending to revenue.

It's a good start.

GOP has no backup plan after vote - Jonathan Allen and Jake Sherman - POLITICO.com

Everyone keeps saying that the R's are just doing the best they can to move the needle on a deal.

This and other such stories shows they don't want a deal. They want a surrender. Remember the Affordable Care Act> They went all or nothing on that one previously, and got nothing.

Of course, in this case nothing means a worldwide recession and the downgrading of US debt that will instantly add 10-15% to the amount that every US Citizen owes.

The problem with the Coburn plan is it's unrealistic to think benefit cuts in Medicare will survive. Old people control elections and will only become a larger voting block. The eligibility increase would be hard to change once enacted, but the added cost sharing is very likely to get watered down over the next decade. Even the GOP 2010 wave was largely about Obama cut your Medicare.

We must be referring to different 2010 elections. The 2010 wave was largely that the economy sucked and the Dems had no real answers in power during the previous two years.