Deficits and Facts

[chris_gerrib]

I'm going to a Rotary convention tomorrow, so no postings. But here's a pair of charts that should be front and center at every discussion of the deficit (hat tip James Fallows:

Comments

[jetfx.livejournal.com]

But if you want to keep paying for all these things on that chart, the only option is to gut welfare programs.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Y' know, I hear what you're saying about how the tax increases you advocate are not the crushing burden I've spoken of. The point that you're missing is that spending other people's money is fun. The more you tax, the more the Federal Government and its imitators at the State level will spend. And borrow, so they can keep spending.

Point blank: We can't afford to keep enabling that behavior.

If government spending froze, absolutely, the tax increases you advocate would in time bring matters back to an even keel. Sorry, but government doesn't work that way. The Democrat-bred monster is hungry, and it will consume and increase in size, still sucking life's blood until it destroys the nation upon which it feeds.

Tax increase? Okay, if it's provably necessary. But we as a nation pay quite enough taxes already to support a reasonable government (indeed, a HUGE reasonable government). Reducing the Federal budget to what it was in 1950 would do far, far more for the nation.

[You may have heard that when the income tax was proposed, arguments that it should be capped at a given level were countered by protests that this would be giving government license to tax up to that exorbitant rate (15% or whatever it was). So no limit on taxation was set. Good God, what idiots.]

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Reducing the Federal budget to 1950's level means:

1) No EPA.
2) No civil rights enforcement.
3) No Medicare or Medicaid.

Sorry, but I don't want rivers to catch fire, color lines in restaurants or old people suiciding because they can't afford medical care.

“A vapor trail of zeroes”

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

That's completely understandable. Now: Tell me how hyperinflation and a bankrupt, collapsed Federal Government are going to prevent these things.

[Though I don't imagine the first two will be much of a problem, as economic collapse means no heavy industries or restaurants.)

Neither you nor I are going to solve these problems, but the problem here does go deeper than simply not squeezing the ungrateful lumpenproletariat hard enough. Government budgets increase, and never ever decrease except by outside force acting on them. “The Government doesn't spend money like a drunken sailor, because the sailor stops spending when he runs out.”

All that biting deeper and yet deeper into the economic health of the nation will do, is that as tax evasion becomes pandemic and the collected revenues plummet and capital flees the country by every available means, State and Federal Governments, already billions and now trillions in the red, will no longer be able to borrow - and borrow, and borrow - to support the elephantine bureaucracies and literally uncounted and unaccountable floods of fraud and waste that are now seen as inevitable…

The department was blamed (http://baron-waste.livejournal.com/624011.html) for up to $2 billion of waste and fraud after audits by the Government Accountability Office revealed widespread misuse of government credit cards by DHS employees, with purchases including beer brewing kits, $70,000 of plastic dog booties that were later deemed unusable, boats purchased at double the retail price (many of which later could not be found), and iPods ostensibly for use in “data storage”…

The GAO routinely reports billions of dollars simply lost by a Government that can't be bothered to keep track of every measly billion it wallows in, and anyway knows there's always more where that came from…

“A fool and his money, are some party.” But it's your money. How much more of it are you willing to see taken from you, and given to such people as these?

Re: “A vapor trail of zeroes”

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

By the bye, I didn't say, Let's return to the government agencies we had in 1950. People on both sides of the aisle have argued - for their own partisan reasons, both pro- and anti-aerospace - that NASA is essentially worthless and ought to be shut down, but telling them they're NACA again would be, y' know, awkward.

(I dunno, though, the idea is tempting. Imagine where we'd be by now, if the Democrat Kennedy hadn't short-circuited the whole progress of US eerospace development with his Moon Race publicity stunt. Remember the X-20 Dynasoar (http://www.astronautix.com/flights/dynsoar3.htm)?)

Re: “A vapor trail of zeroes”

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Worrying about hyperinflation in the current environment is much like the anorexic worrying about being too fat. It's simply not logical nor supported by any facts.

Re: “A Warning to Future Man”

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

not logical nor supported by

Yah, well, neither was Richard Shaver (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Shaver#The_Shaver_Mystery), but did he let that stop him? NO!

[(Anonymous)]

baron,
You like 1950. Let's return to the tax rates of 1950.

Jerry Critter
critterscrap.blogspot.com