I found this fairly straight forward, though of course they blamed only the Politicians and not all of us Constituents. Maybe it is hard to look in the mirror, and it is probably a bad idea for a writer/news organization to blame its readers...
CNN - National Debt 5 Minute Primer
Another interesting link.
GAO: Debt Ownership
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Well, in a previous post you seem willing to accept that you are bound by some "covenant" to the outrageous spending levels inflicted on us by self-serving and unprincipled politicians. If this were a minor thing, where they have overspent by 10% or so for a couple of years, we would chalk this up to minor political differences in governing philosophy and maybe even "compromise" to solve the problem. We are far, far beyond that situation.
Neal Boortz has run the numbers, and I quote: "If you raised the tax rate on all income above $250,000 to 100%, with no deductions; and you confiscated all profit from the Fortune 500 companies; and you confiscated ALL wealth of every US billionaire-- their stocks, bonds, bank accounts, sold their homes and yachts and cars and put them on the street; you would be able to sustain current federal spending levels for seven (7) months!
Cutting $1.2 trillion off of this year's deficit would be a good start, but over ten years??? It's a drop in the bucket. That's the problem, is that sooner or later, federal spending MUST be vastly curtailed; it cannot possibly continue. The only question is whether our politicians are going to tell us the truth and radically curtail it by choice, or wait until the nation goes over the cliff and the choices get vastly more unpleasant.
J. Ewing
A slight semantics issue:
I believe we are bound by the rules of the Society we choose to live within. With this, we reap a portion of the benefits or incur a portion of the costs.
I believe we have a responsibility to participate within the society in an effort to improve it. To do this we have to balance personal and societal needs.
The challenge of course is that WE on the whole have a hard time with the idea of balance. Few want to pay for our society (taxes, regulations), and many want to benefit personally from it.(tax red'n, programs, credits, etc) I think the solution involves significant reprioritization and large cuts, along with additional revenues. Now are we willing to weight our vote a little more for society and a little less for ourselves. Only time will tell.
The nice thing about our Society is that the Constitution allows significant latitude for change.
Remember that I proposed the draconian idea of ending all Social Security payments immediately. My rationale was pretty simple, you folks that allowed this debt to grow through your votes and self centered lobbying do not deserve any money until it is paid off. As soon as the consequences of your last 60+ years of choices are paid off and the program is funded, the payments will resume.
This way the sins of the parents would not be paid for by the chidren. I doubt it will be too popular with the AARP folks.
Reminds me of a bumper sticker, easily re-used with a little edit. "Don't blame me, I voted for McCain."
"WE" did NOT vote for all of this. Many of us have voted against it at every opportunity, written and phoned our representatives, etc. The problem is the one identified by the ancient Greeks, that "democracy lasts only until people discover they can vote themselves wealth from the public treasury." I'm not sure we're quite to that point in the population at large, and Obama may have done us a great favor by exacerbating the problem so quickly beyond our tolerance for change that we are ready to return to a more sensible level of government involvement in our lives.
J. Ewing
The bumper sticker seems to represent how most people seem to think. When things go well they take credit and when things go poorly they distance themselves. Often I think they are not even aware they are doing it.
I am assuming you supported and voted for tax cuts, thus supported the growing National Debt. It is a matter of perspective. (ie income - spend = debt)
Your statements remind me of team members that come along at the end of the project and say that they would have done it differently. Thankfully it rarely happens at work. So what do you do when your Church or other organizations you belong to take actions you disagree with? Distance yourself, Quit them, Blame others, or Accept the groups choice and support it until you can influence the decision.
Just because I support tax cuts does NOT mean I am responsible for deficits. Runaway spending, as clearly illustrated by our present situation, is 100% of the problem, and the problem is of astronomical size and growing. If you rescind the Bush tax cuts (giving larger tax increases to lower and middle class taxpayers, contrary to popular belief), you can eliminate just about 5% of the this year's deficit. If you add Obama's tax hikes on the rich to it, you can cover about 1/6 of this year's (actually next year's) deficit. There is one and only one rational way to get past this deficit spending, and that is to cut $1.4 Trillion out of spending THIS YEAR, and then stay at that spending level. Mind you this doesn't do a thing for the national DEBT except to quit adding to it.
What do I do when a church or other organization decides, by majority vote and over my strenuous objection, to destroy themselves? I start looking for another such organization with which to associate myself, at a safe distance from the destruction. That doesn't apply here because there is no other country where my whole life and family are kept.
That is why I keep trying so hard to make people understand that the Left's lies about the budget are exactly that. This spending is "unsustainable," a word that does not seem to carry the terror that it should, and a few more taxes, a lot more taxes, or an impossible amount of taxes (more than 100%) won't fix it.
J. Ewing
John,
I was surprised at how reasonable you were sounding until I got to this nonsense:
"Remember that I proposed the draconian idea of ending all Social Security payments immediately. My rationale was pretty simple, you folks that allowed this debt to grow through your votes and self centered lobbying do not deserve any money until it is paid off. As soon as the consequences of your last 60+ years of choices are paid off and the program is funded, the payments will resume."
Social security has little (nothing) to do with our current deficit situation other than we were played for chumps by our reps, who loaned our excess SS $ to the gen. fed budget fund. It is some kind of weird scheme in which my taxes will need to be raised in order to repay the ss fund the $ needed to pay my benefit (which should be paid out of the payroll taxes I've paid for 30 years.) It seems like I am likely to be charged double for our leaders mismanagement of the SS fund. I have nothing more to add to that crystal clear explanation of my take on the SS / deficit situation.
Laurie,
Of course Social Security a paying for it has everything to do with our current situation and discussion. The reason those Reps could side track those funds so easily was because the citizens were more than happy to spend more and pay lower taxes. The Liberals and Conservatives were pumped and ready to rob the Trust Fund. Even if it would be illegal for one of those heartless Corporations to do it.
It really did not matter at that point in time that they were pushing the bill out to their kids. So I think it would only be fair that they pay the bills that their generation incurred and enjoyed the benefits of.
It seems this would be pretty rational to folks who believe in paying their bills. By the way I realize this will not happen, however it is definitely an interesting and different perspective.
"Nonsense" is definitely an interesting word/judgement.
You are all under the impression-- the "lie" Rick Perry talks about-- foisted upon us that Social Security is some sort of "investment" and that there is an "account" with your name on it, and that there is some "trust fund" that has been squandered by Congress instead of being "there" to pay benefits. None of these things are, were, or ever can be true.
SS was set up from the get-go as a Ponzi scheme in which the first investors were paid from the buy-in of future investors, thereby leading future investors to believe they would receive the same high returns. A Ponzi or pyramid scheme fails when there aren't enough new people being added at the bottom (or when there aren't enough people on the whole planet) to pay for the huge number of investors that have been promised huge returns. Time to quit listening to the lies, call it what it is, and fix it.
There is no "account" set aside for you, no more than you have claim to some specific benefit that you receive from paying any other tax. Congress may, at any time, decide to cut or even quit paying SS entirely, at their whim. Indeed, at the current time, with SS operating in the red, Congress will have to buy back some of the bonds in the Trust Fund with money from the general fund. This means they can increase the deficit, raise taxes, or cut benefits, or some combination. Interestingly enough, those are the same choices Congress has had for the last 40 years, and will have for at least the next 40, as the problem gets bigger and bigger.
Finally, it doesn't matter one whit what Congress did with the Trust Fund surplus. BY LAW, any surplus must be "invested" in a special class of Treasury Bond specifically for the Fund. The proceeds from this bond sale, like all US bond sales, goes into the general fund and is spent by an eager and willing Congress. Even if Congress ran a real surplus, they couldn't redeem these bonds, because the money would have no place to go until some additional senior citizen became eligible for benefits.
Meanwhile, we're squabbling over trifles like SS when, even taking your outrageous suggestion of cutting all SS payments immediately, you still only reduce this year's deficit by about
one third. Just refusing to pay the red ink portion of SS is about 1% of the deficit problem. Again, the only route to a balanced budget is a meat-axe that lops off the 40% of the budget that is the deficit, and which was ADDED since Bush left office. Surely most of that wild spending is unnecessary, it just needs to be found and killed.
J. Ewing
Post a Comment