Quote:
Originally Posted by molson
It's also interesting to move this in the other direction, and project where a hardcore liberal agenda takes the debt.
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I guess that depends on what you define as "hardcore liberal".
If any cuts to military spending qualify as "hardcore liberal," there's over a trillion dollars in savings just in the military options presented alone.
Spent an extra $140 billion on food stamps with the COLA adjustment, made some changes in Medicare to increase incoming revenue (both of which I would expect to be inline with "hardcore liberal" under the definition I presume we're playing with).
Expanded health care coverage, increased mass transit funding, implemented cap-and-trade, increased certain taxes (payroll, social security), doubled the dependent exemption, curtail deductions for "high income earners," expand the tax credits for the working poor and make permanent the college-for-community-service credit, began the excise tax on high-value health plans five years sooner.
All of that got me to 59% of GDP by the deadline.
Granted, if I continued any of the Bush tax cuts, that changes things, but would preserving any of those be "hardcore liberal" or "political expediency"?