The Glade 4.0

Democrats are actually coming out now and saying they have no intention of even trying to balance the budget. Unbelievable. Hopefully people will at least stop blaming Republicans now for stonewalling, if Democrats aren't even interested in solving the problem.



Despite the above, and countless statements on the campaign trail, he's not even going to try.

Barack Obama is a self-interested demagogue with no concern for the fiscal or social well-being of this nation. I've been saying this since he started running for President the first time.

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Neither of those sentiments are contained in the article you quoted, AK. What Obama says is that we're not going to balance the budget in 10 years, which is simply recognizing reality, and that his goal is to grow the economy, increase employment and control spending, which will lead to balance, but that he's not seeking balance purely as an end unto itself. One can disagree with that set of priorities, but it's not the same as saying that balance is unnecessary or that he has no intention to even try to balance the budget.

Also, this: "In the budget presented Tuesday, Ryan proposes balancing the budget over a decade, finding savings in government spending by eliminating most of Obama's health care reforms and streamlining the federal tax code"....is a ridiculous statement.

Codifying and entrenching bad money habits further will only increase the disparity. Arathain's interpretation is exactly correct:

Obama refuses to take responsibility for the economic actions of his administration. The party line and his position is: "It's Bush's fault." It ceased to be Bush's fault in March of 2009, and your continued insistence that everything wrong is still the previous Administration's or the fault of Obama's detractors is asinine. He has no intention of balancing he budget, primarily because past behavior indicates as such. He's orchestrated a political witch hunt for obstructionists, blamed the Republicans for the outcome, and you guys continue to believe him.

Barack Obama is a demagogue who has only his own money and his own power in mind. He doesn't care about you; he doesn't care about your political or social issues; he doesn't care what the long term outcome is, because he's not affected by it.
Considering the health care reforms have increased the cost of care, decreased access to care, decreased availability of care, and created new impediments for viable and reasonable care, how is that ridiculous? Moreover, you're certainly burying the fact the U.N. proclaimed the United States as having the most progressive tax code on the planet; only it doesn't work because too few of our citizens actually have any skin in the game. But let me guess, the rich still don't pay their fair share?

Stop spewing bullshit misinformation as if its fact just because it follows the party line. Facts dispute everything your political agenda pushes; facts dispute the efficacy of your 3-monkey Democrat and his first 2 years.

I'm sorry your candidate didn't work out as promised; I'm sorry the first black president has been such an abysmal failure for our nation, because the last thing we needed was more fuel for a bad stereotype. But he's failed and will continue to fail for 3 more years. If you want things to get better ...

1. Stop voting for party candidates.
2. Stop defending party policy.
3. Stop believing the demagogues: "Look with your eyes, not with your ears." Syrio Forel

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OBAMA, MARCH 12: I think what is important to recognize is that we've already cut $2.7 trillion out of the deficit. If the sequester stays in, you have got over three-and-a-half trillion dollars of deficit reduction already. And so, we don't have an immediate crisis in terms of debt. In fact, for the next 10years, it's going to be in a sustainable place.

OBAMA, JULY 3, 2008: The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years, is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents, number 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome. So we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back. Thirty thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child. That's irresponsible. That's unpatriotic.

Arathain:

You're pissing in the wind. RangerDave addressed both of your emendations with his original post -- "Obama never said that."

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Ah, those comments weren't in the spoilered quote you put in your post, and there's no link to click through to the main article. Anyway, I think I see the disconnect between us. It's a question of time horizon. I took your original post to be a complaint that Obama and the Dems had declared that balancing the budget is not necessary at any point, whereas I understand Obama's statements to be about balancing the budget in the next ten years.

It is true that there's a sizable faction within the Democratic party and among left-leaning policy people generally that does believe moderate deficits are indefinitely sustainable and thus there's no need to ever balance the budget. It's similar to Cheney's "deficits don't matter" line. I'm just saying the Obama Administration's comments about the next 10 years, specifically, are not the same thing.


Again, I think this reflects my point about time horizons. There's no immediate debt crisis, and we've made a bunch of cuts already, so there's no need to push for a balanced budget in the next 10 years.


Pointing out that it's irresponsible to nearly double the debt during a period of relative economic stability is not inconsistent with choosing to run deficits in the wake of a severe financial crisis and during the ensuing period of recession and high unemployment.

...

Seriously?

That's your argument? The Bush Administration was a period of "relative economic stability" ...

Bush inherited the .com collapse; he presided over the collapse of our "Housing Bubble"; he was President during the worst "recession" since the Great Depression (according to the Keynesians); and you want fiscal responsibility from Bush but a free pass for the exact same policy direction from Obama?

GIVE ME A ****' BREAK!

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RD: No offense, but are you retarded?

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/ ... look_2.pdf

In the next ten years, at it's current pace the deficit will reach 90% of GDP by 2022. How far down the road are you willing to kick the can?

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Disregard the specifics of Ryan's plan for just a moment. Imagine your ideal balanced budget, with whatever attendant changes in spending and/or taxation you see fit. In the abstract, why would implementing those changes over 10 years be unrealistic?

The only argument I ever hear is that it will destroy economic growth. On face value, this is the typical Neo-Keynesian argument that government spending, especially deficit government spending is good for the economy. For all the good it will do it me, my usual criticism applies:

At the core, I reject the (Neo-) Keynesian dismemberment of savings and investment. I might not go quite so far as to say savings = investment (all reductionist theories tend to be problematic), but certainly the two things are more deeply entwined than Neo-Keynesianism will admit. "Hoarding" -- if it ever really even happens -- is not a problem to be solved. Without that bad fundamental assumption, the rest of the theory crumbles. It doesn't matter how you allocate it: a monolithic budget is never going to be better at predicting how to allocate resources for maximum economic benefit than "crowd sourcing" it through the private sector and the price system. Yes, Virginia, the economy really is that stochastic.

But even within a Neo-Keynesian framework, this objection to a 10-year balanced budget is bizarre. The idea goes that liquidity is everything. Recessions are caused by not enough of it, and bubbles are caused by too much of it. The government can ostensibly manage the economy by deficit spending in a recession to force increased spending, with the flip side of the coin being that they reduce spending and run surpluses during a boom to soak up the excess. Perpetual deficit spending was never part of the plan. Even by Neo-Keynesian thought, long term deficit government spending has zero net impact on GDP and only serves to ramp up inflation.

This is where things get pretty ironic. Aiming to get the budget ramped down just to parity, let alone surplus, 10 years from now would actually be par-for-the-course for actual Neo-Keynesian economics. "Please, won't someone think of the economy" doesn't make any sense in this context. It's either woefully misinformed about the economic theory it's espousing, or else it's just blatantly hollow political demagoguery. The only way to make the policy jive with theory is by tacitly admitting that you expect us to still be in a recession 10 years from now.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

non-sequitur but...

We can't balance the budget because it would require taking away Grandma's health care, which is not politically viable. Medicare and Medicaid are pretty much the beginning and end of our budget problems. Before you mention Social Security, remember that while Social Security definitely isn't sustainable as it exists now, it's important to note that SS has never borrowed money and under current law never will borrow money.

Most of the deficit is directly caused by the fact that Medicare/Medicaid have spending of $700 billion on $180 billion in revenues, and have been running absurd deficits like this for decades. This absurd deficit exists despite the fact that these programs underpay significantly for the care that they cover. Health care in retirement is just that goddamned expensive. The costs for these two programs go up by like 5% a year, and since these programs already underpay, you can't make any cuts without completely destroying their viability altogether. Almost the entire annual debt is also due to the deficits from these two programs plus service on debt caused by previous deficits from these two programs. The "general budget" of all revenue except the payroll taxes minus all spending except for SS/Medicare/Medicaid was actually in surplus until 2009, and even today its debt is not very high.

So rather than discuss the fact that the CBO states the deficit will be 90% of GDP by 2022 under current policy, you instead snark onto a quote by said theoretical physicist?

/golfclap

If it helps let me attach my own dumb picture:

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Actually I wasn't trying to make an argument or point at all. (thus me labeling it a non sequitur) and the comment is not mine, but from the comic's author.

(http://xkcd.com/947/ -- its the mouseover text for the image, as is standard for all XKCD comics)

It's easy to run a surplus on SS/Medicare/Medicaid when you're not paying bills to private practices for the latter two.

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Give him credit for admitting it. No US President has really balanced the budget for several decades (Clinton stealing from SocSec doesn't count). None of them have had any intention of doing so. At least he's stopped paying lip-service to the concept.

Of course, that just means he's openly being a moron instead of futilely trying to hide it, like Dubya did.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Eisenhower was the only President in the 20th Century to preside over a single balanced budget. Andrew Jackson was the only President in U.S. History to pay off our National Debt. After those two, you have varying degrees of fiscal irresponsibility. Of the last 5 Presidents, 4 which have served 2 terms, Reagan was the most fiscally responsible, and I'm not sure that's a compliment in the company mentioned.

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He's a liar. The election's over, so he's coming clean.

Time horizons? They said it <might> be balanced <around> 2040. That's 27 years. I'll be 63. My son will be starting his family.

Completely unacceptable. Absurdly so.

Why is that unacceptable? I'm not being smart-ass or willfully dense here. What actual negative effects are you concerned will occur if we don't balance the budget until 2040?

He got to be the first black president and now he's going to be "RICH *****!" What does he care? He has nothing to lose.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Anyone else read that and hear Yolandi's voice in their head? (NSFW - Die Antwoord)

Fiscal insolvency.

You guys haven't done the research, and I'm not at my home computer to present it, but across the board taxes regardless of income need to be raised to 70% to pay for Medicare alone for the next 40 years. Period.

Failure to cut or reform anyplace else is going to rationing and austerity measures or blatant monetization of debt the likes of which are hard to imagine.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

It's not hard to imagine, as that's exactly what the Fed has been doing for the last 5 years. We're currently in our 6th round of quantitative easing, but that never gets mentioned in the mainstream media. Geitner and Obama are Weimarring our currency and economy, as you well know DFK.

RangerDave:

How many times do I have to explain the following to you before it sinks in?

1. Resources are finite.
2. As long as resources are finite, there will be wealth, income, and economic leverage disparity.
3. The Law of Supply and Demand is real, not a politically inconvenient guideline.

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