Posted on 11/23/2012 8:28:27 AM PST by Behind Liberal Lines
"They're not even...talking about real cuts. They're talking about cuts in baseline budgeting..."
"If they propose, let's say, a $10 billion increase for next year and cut it down to $9 billion, they say they're cutting 10 percent. But they're not cutting anything, they're only increasing it $9 billion instead of $10 billion. It's done on purpose so that people get confused."
"When government spending is about $3.8 trillion, you're going to cut $100 billion? That's a deck chair on the Titanic," said Russ Roberts of the Hoover Institution. "If they're actual cuts, I think that would be great. I'd cut 10, 20 percent across the board if I had my druthers. But across the board scares people because they think, 'Let's save the things that are really important and cut the things that are not so important.' (But) that never works."
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
will people notice when they lose a tax credit and gain a $1500.00 tax bill ,no I don’t think so LOL
Admin, can we start a "Taxamageddon" button or filter?
How can I send you a 3 page PDF file with a from - to of all the changes if no deal is made?
It is scary....
You make a great point. The term baseline budgeting has to be explained to a great many people.
The Titanic displaced 46,000 tons. What's a deck chair?
Say 20 lbs or 0.01 tons. Then a deck chair to the Titanic is about 1 to 5,000,000 = $760,000 to $3.8 trillion, so this metaphor could aptly be applied to a cut of $1 million in a $3.8 trillion budget. $100 billion is actually fairly substantial, and would reduce $3.8 trillion to $3.7 trillion.
Reason!
LOL did you forget the /sarc?? Your analogy is irrelevant
$100B is utterly meaningless.
Actually, the metaphor is more like the Titanic, while sinking, takes on a shipment of 1000 more chairs (apply your math accordingly) - and, noting that the ship is sinking and can’t take on any more weigh lest it sink faster, the captain grudgingly agrees to reduce the acquisition by 10 chairs. The boat is still sinking, faster now thanks to the addition of 990 unnecessary and unaffordable chairs. The captain then lauded for having reduced the load and slowing the demise.
To the point of #6, you’re not noting that the current budget is $3.5T.
“The captain then lauded for having reduced the load and slowing the demise.”
He “Reduced the deficit in a responsible way”.
I was noting the unREASONableness of saying, as in the quoted phrase, that $100 billion is to $3.8 trillion as a deck chair is to the Titanic, since it is in fact 1/38 of that quantity, which is a substantial fraction.
That the analogy should reference 38 deck chairs instead of 1 is a fine correction.
That the new load of 300 chairs, taken on while sinking, is reduced to 262 new chairs instead of 299, misses the issue: taking on any increased load is stupid, and every leader involved in bickering over the size of the increase should be removed from the decision making process and used as ballast reduction.
Try to pay attention. A deck chair would represent $1 million compared to the "titanic" value of $3.8 trillion, by mass as I estimate. That means it would take 100,000 deck chairs to represent the wrongfully scorned $100 billion, as they amount to 1/38 the mass of the Titanic by the same estimation, and $100 billion is 1/38 of $3.8 trillion.
A better analogy would be two alcoholics at an all you can drink party having a learned discussion over the virtues of sobriety. With each alcoholic swearing to stop drinking...next time.
This whole thing is laughable. Neither party is seriously interested in reducing entitlements like SS or medicare. Even if taxes are raised, history has shown that it doesn’t bring in anywhere near the expected revenue as people figure out ways to avoid them. That leaves the “solution” of kicking the can further down the road and further monetizing the debt. And that really does work... until you destroy your currency.
If one wants to use a sinking-ship analogy, a better one might be that of a boat which starts to take on water and has a crew which, recognizing that a small hole in the bottom of a fast-moving boat will let out water, decides to drill some holes. As the water level in the boat starts to increase, the crew decides the problem is that it isn't drilling holes fast enough, and thus redoubles its efforts.
Drilling holes to let out water could be reasonable in some limited scenarios (provided that one could close the holes when they were no longer useful). Unfortunately, if the notion that "holes are useful" becomes accepted dogma without the qualifiers "in certain limited scenarios, but they're generally harmful" it becomes very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that when drilling holes fails to stop the ship's intake of water, such failure is a result of not drilling enough holes, rather than recognizing that the newly-drilled holes could in fact be a bigger problem than the original leak.
I wish Republicans would grow a spine and recognize this principle. If some people are calling for a thousand holes, trying to compromise with them to only drill a hundred is not useful. What's necessary is to stand firm to the fact that the reason for not drilling 1,000 holes isn't that the resources for drilling those holes could be better spent elsewhere, but rather that drilling holes is counter-productive. A compromise on the number of holes to be drilled will make such argument impossible.
In some contexts, 2.5% is significant. In other cases, it isn't. If one had a means of absorbing 97.5% of the kinetic energy of an object which was heading toward a wall, having a means of safely absorbing another 2.5 percentage points could make a huge difference compared with not having it. Even if one could only absorb 96% of the original energy, a means of absorbing an extra 2.5 percentage points could cut the impact energy by more than half. On the other hand, if one is faced with hitting a wall at 100mph, something that absorbed 2.5% of the kinetic energy (reducing the speed to 98.7mph) prior to impact would be unlikely to make much difference.
It's roughly $318,471 for every person in the country.
That number does nothing but increase.
Two or three trillion doesn't matter now. The jig is up.
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