Posted on 11/09/2010 6:48:59 AM PST by WebFocus
One of the most frustrating tendencies of mainstream leaders in the United States is their willingness, year after debilitating year, to embrace policies that have no hope of succeeding.
From Lyndon Johnson’s mad pursuit of victory in Vietnam to George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq to today’s delusionary deficit zealots, the tragic lure of the impossible dream seems never to subside.
Ronald Reagan told us he could cut taxes, jack up defense spending and balance the budget — all at the same time. How’d he do? As his biographer Garry Wills tells us, the Gipper “nearly tripled the deficit in his eight years, and never made a realistic proposal for cutting it.”
President Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan while promising to start bringing our troops home next summer, which is like a heavyweight boxer throwing roundhouse rights while assuring his opponent that he won’t fight quite as hard after the eighth or ninth round.
I don’t know if it’s the drinking water or the rarefied air at the highest reaches of government that makes so many of our leaders go loopy. Whatever it is, we need to put a stop to these self-defeating tendencies. The U.S. is in sad shape, and most of the policy prescriptions being tossed around by the movers and shakers are bad ones.
To get a sense of how deeply entrenched the problems are, consider what passes for good news these days. The economy added 151,000 jobs last month, which was more than most economists had expected. But even at that rate of job growth, it would take 15 to 20 years to get the employment rate back to where it was when the Great Recession began in December 2007.
There is no time to waste on plans that can’t succeed.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The new Congress has a lot of deficit hawks. The people elected them PRECISELY because of their fiscal stance.
Their main agenda is to :
1) Radically cut budgets 2) Shrink the government,
REASON:
Doing so will:
1) Get the economy moving again
2) Will eventually bring budgets into balance as neatly as some ideal middle-class family balances its checkbook.
BUT:
1) They want to achieve this without raising taxes.
2) They are not in favor of cuts in benefits to senior citizens, meaning Social Security and Medicare, or any reductions in veterans’ benefits.
Mr. Herbert does not believe that the above plan will work at all.
Of course, he blames the huge deficits we have on :
1) Bush-era tax cuts,
2) the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
3) the spending that was needed to keep the Great Recession from spiraling into another Great Depression.
HIS CONCLUSION:
You can’t have a coherent conversation about deficit reduction if tax increases are off the table and the country is still at war. This is fantasyland economics, the equivalent of believing that John Boehner can fly ( his words in the column ).
Funny how the War on Poverty, Social Security, and every other form of welfare are never listed as policies that have no hope of succeeding.
Question for Bob Herbert: If tax hikes are popular, why doesn’t ANY Democrat run on a platform to raise them?
Idiot.
vaudine
How much revenue will the government raise if they increase taxes to 100%?
When Republicans win, liberals trot out the tax hike demand to tackle the deficit.
They never focus on the need to reduce spending.
This is a trap the GOP should avoid.
LBJ’s disastrous “War on Poverty” has cost the U.S. taxpayer approximately 10 trillion dollars. But of course it was worth it because we have no more poor people, right?
Government is the worst manager of the economy, always has been and always will be, because they are throwing around other people’s money.
How does anyone take the NY rag seriously any more?
Let’s see: Bob wants more taxes, more spending and more shovel ready “spread the wealth” programs - just what we’ve been doing the past two years.
How well has that worked out so far? He doesn’t address it.
Let’s ask them if there is ANY spendig cuts they ever liked or proposed
(except the military)
P.S. where is all the billions in savings from finding fraud and waste in medicare and medicaid? Just wondering. That was supposed to fund the new health care bill, is why I ask.
We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.
RE: Question for Bob Herbert: If tax hikes are popular, why doesn’t ANY Democrat run on a platform to raise them?
I heard Mark Simon ask him this question once in his show some time back.
Herbert’s answer is this — THAT IS PRECISELY THE PROBLEM. We should not confuse popularity with what needs to be done.
The American voters have painted themselves in an impossible situation.... they WANT their favorite government program to exist yet, are not willing to pay for them.
Politicians cannot run on a platform of tax increases because it is unpopular. That does not mean that because it is unpopular, it is unnecessary.
President Reagan submitted 7 of 8 BALANCED budgets to the DEMOCRAT controlled Congress.
We don’t have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.
That’s without dealing with entitlements. Nowhere does Bob propose how to get those costs under control before they consume every tax dollar that we have coming in apart from servicing the exploding debt.
He is not serious.
raise taxes? sure IF for every dollar of increased taxes, there is a corresponding spending cut (cut, not reduction in rise) of $2.
The Democrats will happily take the increased taxes but they will reject the spending cuts.
RE: We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.
The way I see it, we have the following choices :
1 Cut spending, cut taxes
2 Cut spending, increase taxes
3 Increase spending, increase taxes
4 Increase spending, Cut taxes
Obama and the Democratic Congress have opted for #3 above the past two years.
George W. Bush and his Republican Congress opted for #4 above between 2001 to 2006.
Bob Herbert and his ilk seem to want the #2 solution above.
The recently elected Congress at least rhetorically says they want the #1 solution above.
Ronald Reagan attempted to implement #1 but ended up doing #4 in practice (with the Congress he had to work with ).
You mean people want free stuff?
Who could have possibly foreseen that?
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