If Romney wins, and we all stay involved, the boot of Government will be removed from the necks of Americans. If we have an energy boom in the whole country as they are having in North Dakota, then there will be enough revenue to pay off the debt and phase out Social Security.
No, it won’t.
This is what I keep hammering on here at FR: The numbers are such that we’re passing (or have just passed) the point of no fiscal return without real, substantial pain.
The GOP has been buying into this idiotic meme that we can “grow our way out of our deficits” for years - over a decade now. A decade ago, it might have been possible if the GOP had manned up and made the right cuts and the right trade policy changes.
Now, the spending numbers are overwhelming the economy’s ability to generate growth (and therefore new tax revenue).
Ryan’s spending plan is a farce - it takes far too long to get to a state where we have only a $400B deficit - never a balanced budget. If we want to turn this around and avoid a EU-style implosion, we need to be talking about cutting at least $500B in real spending cuts this year, next year and the year after that. The GOP stupidly says “no defense cuts,” when the DOD budget is bloated beyond it’s mission, the DNC says “no entitlement cuts” when there’s at least $60B of fraud in Medicare alone per year, and who knows how much other fraud.
The only way to get out of the situation we’re in now is to tell the truth: There will be pain. Much as happened in Iceland, someone needs to have the balls to come forward and say “We’re not going to backstop the bankers. Banks will fail.”
Romney will do none of these things. He’ll be an improvement over the village idiot we have in office now, but these milquetoast Ivy League dandies who the GOP keeps running for office never have the balls to tell people “There will be real cuts. There will be pain. In the end, to clean up this mess, some people who have been living off the taxpayer are going to go broke.”